School banned from teaching courses

AWI International Education Group has lost accreditation on some courses because of NZQA concerns.

NZQA has withdrawn AWI International Education Group’s accreditation for New Zealand Diploma in Business (Leadership and Management) (Level 5) and Diploma in Information Technology (Technical Support) (Level 5).

He said 40 students were affected by the move. The Level 7 students would finish their course at AWI but the Level 5 students would transfer to Concordia Institute of Business, run by Aspire2 International.

NZQA had previously withdrawn AWI’s accreditation for New Zealand Diploma in Business (Level 6) and the New Zealand Institute of Management (Level 5) in 2014.

The Queen St-based school, which has 200 students in total, has had a troubled history.

In May 2015 a student, Parmita Rani, was murdered by her estranged husband Mandeep Singh who stabbed her in the school foyer as she left an exam room.

In 2010 a student, Deepak Nagpal, who was enrolled in a business course at AWI but worked as a fruit packer in the Bay of Plenty, murdered his co-worker and landlady Ravneet Sangha and her 2-year-old daughter Anna in their Otumoetai home.

NZQA did not respond directly to Herald questions about student safety at AWI but referred to the Education (Pastoral Care of International Students) Code of Practice 2016, which makes education providers responsible for student safety and wellbeing.

The Herald asked AWI for comment but had received no response by deadline.

The decision is the latest in a series of crackdowns by regulators on tertiary educational institutions.

Last month NZQA withdrew accreditation for three business courses at the International College of New Zealand, saying 95 per cent of the students who passed should have been failed.

NZQA has also ordered Te Wananga o Aotearoa and New Zealand National College to stop taking students into some courses because of assessment concerns.

It deregistered Linguis International, which had about 1000 students at its peak, for “systemic plagiarism” and placed statutory conditions on one of New Zealand’s biggest schools for international students, Cornell Institute of Business and Technology, saying there were doubts over whether many of its qualifications were genuine.

Manukau Institute of Technology is under investigation by the Tertiary Education Commission over alleged rule breaches at its commercial arm EnterpriseMIT, including claims that tutors completed students’ assignments for them. The polytechnic shut down EnterpriseMIT at the end of last year after a highly critical draft report by the auditors.